Blue Jewellery
by Katharina Winkler
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2020
Date Read: May 14, 2022
Blue Jewellery is a powerful novella about domestic abuse. Blue jewelry is worn by women with abusive partners or parents or both. Only women wear it and it is private. You never remark on another woman’s jewelry. The jewelry worn by women shows the world that they belong to someone who cares enough to beat them. Or is this true? Is it that women have become so inured to the inevitability of a beating that their jewelry just becomes a fact of life?
Filiz is just a young girl when she is approached by Yunus and he declares she is his. Not that he loves her. Not that he can’t live without her. But she is his, his possession. And his she does become against the wishes of her family. And almost from the beginning, Yunus and his mother begin erasing Filiz’s existence, day-by-day.
Not only does Yunus beat Filiz so badly that she is in bed for days, sparking a modicum of remorse from him, but Yunus stops speaking to her altogether. I can only assume that he deems her not worthy of acknowledgment. But there are other petty occurrences, such as her mother-in-law taking credit for the beautiful seat covers Filiz sews for Yunus’ bus. What’s the point? Both mother and son seem juvenile to me.
Filiz is expected to do everything for Yunus – from scrubbing him in the shower to washing his feet and tying his shoes. Talk about juvenile. He isn’t capable of doing any of these things for himself? So instead of having a wife, he has a slave. Literally. Filiz does everything for Yunus and his mother – cooking all the meals, cleaning the house, chopping wood, milking the cows, ironing, sewing, literally everything.
There is no joy between these two. No laughter. No coming together as a team and conquering the world. Only further on, after Yunus moves the family to Austria do we begin to see how sadistic he is. The beatings he inflicts out of jealousy or for no reason. How he tortures the kids for no reason (standing on one leg and if they put a leg down, the bottom of their feet get burned with a lighter).
Throughout this entire brief novella, I kept my fingers crossed that Filiz would escape. I was convinced that if she remained with Yunus, he would eventually kill her. I was also terrified for her kids – that the son would learn violence is his right while the daughters learn it is their duty to take it.
In sparse prose that pulls no punches (couldn’t help it), Winkler’s take on cultural and domestic violence is a profound awakening to the situation many women find themselves in. And most of those situations don’t resolve in the type of success Filiz and her children are able to achieve after Yunus is divorced and moved back to Turkey. What terrified me is that he got remarried. Lord help that new wife and kids.
Comments
Post a Comment